o8 :: Sports Fans

[magentarific]

[ video ]
[ Ohai Yuri is looking pretty serious! Not that she usually looks silly, she just.. looks like she's got an idea. It's not a bad thing, of course. First things first. ]

Sokka! I need to talk to you in person ASAP! Scorpius, you too, but after Sokka. [ Yuri thinks Sokka would probably object to what she needs to ask Scorpius about, after all. ]

Everyone else: Favorite sport, go.

[ Filtered to the SSS. ~80%. ]
[ Someone helped her learn how to filter things much better, okay. ]

Meeting tomorrow morning. 9am. Go to the fountain; you'll be able to get instructions on where to go from there. Let me know if you can't make it before the meeting.

{{ OOC: I'll be posting a thread on her appointments post for the meeting in a little bit. I will update the OOC note here with the link when it's up. Meeting is here. Yuri will have someone from the SSS stand around the fountain from 8 to 9 and tell anyone in the SSS where to go. }}

Comments

[herotypical]

Post-mortem...

[magentarific]

Dead as dead can be. I was in an afterlife before this.

[herotypical]

[ ...oh. ]

One of the good ones, I hope.

[magentarific]

I guess that depends on what you want. It was a lot like being alive, minus the bad stuff. The world itself isn't that bad. It's what happened before we got there that makes things hard. I'd estimate 25 as the oldest anyone is there and there weren't any happy endings. Or happy middles. That's how you get there.

[herotypical]

...An afterlife just for the Gen-Xers, huh?

[magentarific]

Just for Japanese ones who didn't get a chance to be happy while they were alive no matter how hard we tried.

[herotypical]

How...exclusive. Like the country club of afterlives.

Sorry, though. About the happiness thing.

[magentarific]

It's just a pit stop. Those of us who can't get reincarnated yet. Less country club, more high school-shaped hotel.

[herotypical]

What's keeping you there? Is there a line up or something?

[ nosy. ]

[magentarific]

We are. Intentionally. [ A pause. ] We were. If I hadn't come here, I'd be pretty sure it was just me left. Since I did, it's me and 4 others left. Everyone else let themselves go. It's easier to disappear than to stick around.

[herotypical]

...So why are you still there? I mean -- what's keeping you?

hey warning to anyone reading. CHILD MURDER MENTIONED IN THIS COMMENT.

[magentarific]

One day when I was younger, our parents were out of the house. It was just me, my brother, and my two sisters. We came from a pretty well-to-do family, our house even looked like a summer home. That day, some suspicious looking men sneaked into the house. It was pretty obvious they were up to no good, but they found us and they rounded us up while they ransacked the house looking for valuables. When they didn't find anything, they pulled me aside because I was the oldest.

[ Yuri pauses for a moment, then in an almost sweet voice, like she's talking to a child.. ]

"Little girl, you're the oldest. They must have told you where the valuables are. Like, 'If there's an earthquake, take it and run,' or 'If a burglar comes, give it to them and tell them to go away.' They must have told you something. Come on now, why don't you go search for something? If we don't like it, you might have to say goodbye to one of these kids here."

[ She still remembers exactly what they told her. ]

I didn't know the difference between a dollar store watch and a Rolex at the time, but they gave me ten minutes each. They had them on their knees, guns pointed at them. Every ten minutes, one of them would die. I wanted to throw up. My head hurt. I was about to collapse and I was terrified, but I ran around the house searching and I found something. This really, really heavy vase. I figured it had to be worth something because it was so heavy, so I tried carrying it down the stairs but it was too big. I couldn't see and I tripped.

Even though I was bleeding, I kept looking but... The police came exactly 30 minutes after the time started and I was the only one left. It's not something you get over just because you get to go to a nice place in the afterlife.

1/2

[herotypical]

[ the slayer feels a lot of things. immense sadness and immense anger. she doesn't entirely understand the girl's openness. she'd barely learned yuri's name and now she knows...

buffy swallows hard and understands that she, herself, could never hope to share that ability. she remains tight-lipped at most corners about the clearer details behind her death(s). wry comments and coping mechanisms are one thing; honesty is another.

in the silence that stretches out, her stomach turns. sadness and anger and disgust. and, strangely, guilt. guilt of the most irrational sort -- for what could she have done? another world; another jurisdiction.

but she felt it all the same. ]

2/2

[herotypical]

N-no. It's not. It's not something you ever just get over, I don't think. That mountains a little too high to climb.

[magentarific]

[ As long as she never said anything about what happened between then and between her death, she could tell it like it was a story because she relived that part of her story every day. The murderers had been arrested. They'd been put in jail, they'd faced trial. She'd never seen the end of it, the trials and appeals and retrials in a triple homicide case would take more than the few years she'd had left, but that wasn't the important part. Those three were her family. Yuri was the one who had been responsible for them. Yuri was the one who had made a mistake and destroyed her one chance to save them. Yuri was the one who wasn't able to accomplish a simple task to just be a good older sister.

Even if it wasn't truly her fault, Yuri felt that it was. She blamed the men who'd done it and they'd been arrested and nothing had changed. She'd been alone from that day on. She'd had no one, even though her parents were still alive, she'd been alone. Being alone like that had to be punishment at first. Then after that, it'd been the only way to protect herself from having to risk losing what she'd cared about. ]

Even though I survived, I still died a little bit after I got out of high school, but dying wasn't why I stuck around. Being forced into a place like this because there's no way that I could accept something like that... when I finally met another person who was like me, we fought together and declared war against God. That's what I'm going to go back to because even though everyone there is gone again, there are still a few left and God finally made a move to take us down.

I'm probably the only dead person here you'll meet who wants to go back to being dead. It's not that I'd rather be dead, of course, but I can't just abandon the few people who are left. I can't stop fighting just because I've got a chance at a new life. I already lived the only one I'm supposed to get. There aren't supposed to be do-overs.

[herotypical]

You're wrong. You -- I mean, you could be wrong. I mean...

[ she trips over her words. ] There aren't supposed to be do-overs. You're not the only one who believes that.

[magentarific]

It's good for some people. This place, if it weren't for those experiments, would be a paradise. Just being able to spend time with people normally and be happy... I couldn't ask for anything else. I know all of that, but I still have my memories. I still have the one life that I already lived. As long as I still have my memories, as long as I still am who I am, I can't accept something like that. I've got to keep fighting. Otherwise I could've stopped existing a long time ago.

[ She smiles, almost as easily as she'd just said that. ]

I already know what I have to do, I just need to figure out what I need to do to get there. Someone from my world told me shortly after I get back, I'll disappear. If Luceti still wants me then, maybe it'll be okay. Until then I have to face my one life.

[ There's no reason for her to hide why she fights. Not if she knows it's right. ]

[herotypical]

Well. I dunno about paradise, but...

There are upsides. And downsides. And smack-dab-in-the-middle-sides. But anyone of us rocking the unfinished business archetype are entitled to feel a little conflicted about here. About...being happy here.

[magentarific]

Just living normally is a paradise for some people. Like I'd ever give up the reason the SSS exists here before then anyway!

[herotypical]

[ living normally. she thought it'd be a paradise but...it was harder than she first anticipated. ]

Sorry. You lost me at triple-S.

[magentarific]

Oh, right, the part of the story I left out. The rebellion against god in my world. The Shinda Sekai Sensen. It means "Afterlife Battlefront" but.. here, it's obviously not the afterlife. Kind of like the sideways-life, probably. We're not waging a war against God either. We're going to open the pathways to other worlds for those who want to go back at their leisure and take the Malnosso down. Whether they're good guys or bad guys, their experiments and waging a war on people we don't even know are really an enemy and not giving us a choice whether we want to fight or not isn't something that we shouldn't get a choice in. As tough as it sounds, I'd rather do it without killing anyone too.

[herotypical]

[ an admirable goal but...well -- a decade into her job and she recognizes the wafting odour of idealism. ]

Kind of a mouthful, don't you think? Not to mention the part where pathway tend to -- more often that not -- turn into big giant interdimensional sink-holes.

But trust me. I'm no fan of the Malnosso. Not by a long shot. But it's patently ridiculous to suggest that the Third Party might not really be an enemy.

[magentarific]

That's why it's just the "SSS." Anyway, I'm not saying it's perfect but if you don't have a goal you're not going to get anywhere. I'm not some kid who just decided I was going to try fighting out of nowhere. I'm not new to this, I'm just... [ She almost looks amused for a second. ] An idiot leading a band of idiots who are willing to try, no matter how long it takes. I'm prepared to keep going for as long as it does, but if I'm going to set goals, I might as well set them high.

If the Malnosso can send us home as they have proved that they can do using the shifts, then that means that it's possible for us to figure it out too. It's better than sitting around saying "We tried, I guess it's best just to go along with it and hope we don't get experimented on and maybe someday go home and leave everyone here who cared about us without a word."

From what I've heard, no one knows anything about them outside of that they try to attack us and we try to attack them. I'm not saying that they're friendly, but I'm not prepared to just assume that because we're told someone's horrible or because we're told someone's good that it's accurate.

[herotypical]

They're out to permanently murder everyone in these enclosures. That's not hearsay. That's what their leader told me -- all on his own. [ before she sliced his wings off. ]

[magentarific]

Huh. See, that's a lot better than what I've heard before in terms of information. This is why I talk to lots of people. Did he say why? It doesn't really matter in terms of it being bad, but if we know why then that's a powerful tool if we understand where they're coming from.